Mo Yan (born March 5, 1955, Gaomi,Shandong province, China) is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer renowned for his imaginative and humanisticfiction, which became popular in the 1980s. Mo was awarded the 2012Nobel Prize in Literature.

Guan Moye attended aprimary school in his hometown but dropped out in the fifth grade during the turmoil of theCultural Revolution. He participated in farmwork for years before he started to work in a factory in 1973. He joined thePeople’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1976 and began writing stories in 1981 under the pseudonym Mo Yan, which means “Don’t Speak.”

While studyingliterature at the PLA Academy of Art from 1984 through 1986, he published stories such asTouming de hongluobo (“Transparent Red Radish”) andBaozha (“Explosions”; Eng. trans. inExplosions and Other Stories). Hisromantic historical storyHonggaoliang (1986; “Red Sorghum”) was later published with four additional stories inHonggaoliang jiazu (1987; “Red Sorghum Family”;Red Sorghum). It won him widespread fame, especially after itsadaptation into a film of the same name (1987).

In Mo’s subsequent work he embraced various approaches—frommyth torealism, fromsatire to love story—but his tales were always marked by an impassioned humanism. In 1989 hisnovelTiantang suantai zhi ge (The Garlic Ballads) was published, followed in 1995 by the collectionMo Yan wenji (“Collected Works of Mo Yan”). Of the stories contained in the latter book, Mo himself was most satisfied withJiuguo (1992;The Republic of Wine). The novelFengru feitun (1995;Big Breasts and Wide Hips) caused some controversy, both for its sexual content and for its failure to depict class struggle according to theChinese Communist Party line. Mo was forced by the PLA to write a self-criticism of the book and towithdraw it from publication (many pirated copies remained available, however).

Mo left his position in the PLA in 1997 and worked as a newspaper editor, but he continued writing fiction, with his rural hometown as the setting for his stories. He admitted that he had been greatly influenced by a wide array of writers such asWilliam Faulkner,James Joyce,Gabriel García Márquez, Minakami Tsutomu,Mishima Yukio, andŌe Kenzaburō. His later works included the collection of eight storiesShifu yue lai yue mo (2000;Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh) and the novelsTanxiang xing (2001;Sandalwood Death),Shengsi pilao (2006;Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out), andWa (2009;Frog).Wan shu de ren (2020;A Late Bloomer) contains 12 novellas.

Mo also wrote plays, includingWomen de Jing Ke (Our Jing Ke) andBawang bieji (“Farewell My Concubine”), both published in 2012. In 2023 he publishedE Yu (“Crocodile”), which centers on a corrupt government official and features a 4-meter- (13-foot-) longcrocodile that can talk. A production of the play was set to tourChina in 2024. In March of that year, Mo was the subject a lawsuit filed by nationalist Chineseblogger Wu Wanzheng, who had been campaigning against Mo online and accusing the Nobel laureate of distorting Chinese history in his works. In the lawsuit, Wu claimed that Mo had smeared the country’s Communist heroes andmartyrs, and he demanded that Mo be made to apologize and to pay damages of one yuan each to every Chinese citizen. He also demanded that Mo’s books be removed from circulation. Wu’s suit was based on a law passed in 2018 that made insulting China’s heroes andmartyrs a crime punishable by as much as three years in prison. However, at the time the lawsuit was filed, there was no indication that the Chinese government was in agreement with Wu’s accusations.